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Just for context on how bad Canadian consumers are getting screwed: when I moved here it was cheaper to pay the roaming fees for my US phone in Canada than it w

Just for context on how bad Canadian consumers are getting screwed: when I moved here it was cheaper to pay the roaming fees for my US phone in Canada than it was to switch to a Canadian telecom.

FractalParadigm 4y ago
There are quite a few Canadians who live close enough to, or travel across the border often enough that their personal phone/number is from a US carrier, usually the closest town or city to their own. Depending on how often or how you use your phone, it can be half the price of having a plan with a domestic carrier. As far as I'm aware, most of the US carriers only require that the device registers on their home network at least once every six months, and bills to a US address, meaning even just a semi-annual shopping trip to somewhere like Port Huron (where you can also purchase a PO box and therefore have a US billing address) can save you hundreds every year. To add some more context, their excuse for high prices and mediocre service is generally something to do with the size of the country, which granted they aren't exactly wrong, until you realize that roughly 90% of the entire Canadian population lives within 160km (100 miles) of a US border. Canadian telecoms are a legal cartel, for all intents and purposes.
- voisin 4y ago
  > To add some more context, their excuse for high prices and mediocre service is generally something to do with the size of the country, which granted they aren't exactly wrong,… Not a problem in other sparsely populated, geographically large countries, like Australia.
  - dghlsakjg 4y ago
    or say... the US which is an even closer comparison
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      The US is around 10x denser than Canada (slightly smaller, 9x the population).
      - sandworm101 4y ago
        Not really. Candians pack more tightly together. There is far more land per person, but 90% of the canadian population, those in cities, live in a smaller area than the 90% us average. Canada is mostly dense cities separated by empty. By comparison, America is one rolling suburb from coast to coast. Take british columbia, a vastly big place by US standards. Drop one 50-mile circle on vancouver and you have 75% of BC's population covered in one service area. If you draw a line from the ski hills north of vancouver, to alaska, you will cross only two roads. Everything to the north is empty by us standards.
        aidenn0 4y ago
        My original comment was correct for mean density, but US clumps too. In addition, Cell phone networks need to cover the area people travel, so unless Canadians only travel in an area 11% that of those in the US, the point stands.
        Reason077 4y ago
        > "unless Canadians only travel in an area 11% that of those in the US" Honestly, that's probably not far off. Canada is enormous, but the vast majority of it is completely uninhabited or very, very sparsely populated.
        bawolff 4y ago
        I'd trade not having service in nunavut for a cheaper phone plan.
  - kiwijamo 4y ago
    Australia has the worst rural service I've come across in my travels so I wouldn't hold them up as a good example. There are medium sized rural towns with service only from one or maybe two telcos and even then the capacity is often rather limited (one town for instance only had a single 15 MHz LTE channel from an omnidirectional antenna serving the entire town and surrounding region). In New Zealand we pay more than the Australians do but we have service from all carriers to even small towns. In New Zealand towns the same size as the Australian town I mentioned would have a cell site (or even two or three!) from each of our three networks with multiple LTE channels providing LTE carrier aggregation of up up to 50—100 MHz and directional panel antennas. The difference in QOS especially at times of high demand is night and day. In more recent times smaller towns have all three networks cooperating to provide service from the same tower (as part of a joint venture between all three networks called Rural Connectivity Group) making it economical to service small towns with no difference in QOS between networks.I'd rather have the latter than the former IMHO.
    - posguy 4y ago
      Upgrading to just sectors would net them so much more range! Sprint and T-Mobile here in the USA used to do egregious stuff like this, or only put up 1 sector of 3 on a tower just to mostly cover a freeway or highway, ignoring the rural userbase entirely.
SECProto 4y ago
> when I moved here it was cheaper to pay the roaming fees for my US phone in Canada than it was to switch to a Canadian telecom. Was it data quantity that made that feasible? My Canadian plan is $45/month and has unlimited phone time and 6 gigs of data (which is great for my usage) and is on one of the big three carriers so coverage is great. Freedom mobile offers 20gb for $50, but their coverage is weaker (i.e. you're roaming outside of major cities). These convert to $33/$36 in USD. Both of these options look significantly cheaper than any plans I quickly see on the big US carriers, before even accounting for the roaming charges (albeit with more limited data)
- lstamour 4y ago
  If you go back to when T-mobile was incredibly competitive, plans were often $20-30. If I want a month, I can get a SIM prepaid for $30 or less with all the data in the US, and sometimes as little as $3 in Europe. Plus there was a time, albeit almost a decade ago now when the dollar was on par. Even about a year ago the dollar was still aiming for 0.8 rather than the 0.74 it’s flirting with right now. Lastly, if you want an Apple Watch with cellular, you end up needing a more expensive plan from the big three rather than their sub-brands. And the Canadian government is threatening regulation to encourage carriers to offer more data for less. There was a time within the decade when $60 at Fido would get you 2GB and that was during a “double data” promo. This was 2018. https://forums.redflagdeals.com/fido-60-unlimited-canada-wide-2gb-1405435/ https://forums.redflagdeals.com/fido-60-unlimited-canada-wid...
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  The landscape has changed since I came in 2018 (after some parliamentary rumblings, the big telcos rolled out "unlimited plans"), but for context, a 5gb plan was considered a large data plan, and generally was in the $80+ range when I arrived, starter plans were generally 2gb in the $60 region. Extra data wasn't throttled, it was charged for at a high rate. The plan I was referring to is an older tmobile plan with 3 lines on it. They come out to just under $50 cad per line including taxes/fees and that includes 5gb of Canadian/Mexican LTE/5g, unlimited 3g after that, as well as unlimited everything in the US, and no extra charge to call anywhere in NA. I can roam on Bell, Telus or Rogers, so tend to get better coverage than my Canadian friends. I also get unlimited worldwide texting and 2g data when I travel for no additional charge. If I switched to one of the new t-mobile plans, I would be paying $59/line, but that includes a free Netflix subscription, and 10gb of Canadian data. I just priced out a roughly comparable rogers plan for the features I actually use (5gb, unlimited US calls, data in the US) and it comes to $65 CAD + $12 per day I'm in the US, or go for the unlimited US plan which is $105 CAD on a promotional offer right now. Add on another 12% for tax and a bunch of fees I'm sure I'd learn about after the fact, and keeping my US service is very competitive. Rogers new plans, are pretty new (I believe unlimited data only started in 2019 or 2020, and their definition of unlimited is 20gb). The takeaway for me is that if I was just a single line, and I didn't leave Canada much, I would probably pay slightly less. Since I call and text the US daily, and travel there for at least a month a year, I save several hundred dollars a year on tmobile, and don't have to worry about getting billed hundreds or thousands because I forgot to buy a data pass for a trip across the border.
ChumpGPT 4y ago
During the NAFTA 2.0 negotiations, Trudeau allow Rogers and Bell to claim they are Canadian Media companies and not telcos giving them protection against American telcos and made sure that Canadians will never enjoy the same rates US Consumers enjoy by offering this protection. It's the same for many Canadian industries that can operate without any competition from the US. I don't think anyone in the US can even fathom the prices Canadians are charged for the service they get. My $80 Googlefi plan (4 lines) would cost around $500 plus a month in Canada.
gambiting 4y ago
When I travelled to Canada for a week for work, it was cheaper to get a random American roaming card off Amazon with a week worth of roaming data than it was to get any local prepaid SIM. It's crazy.

Just for context on how bad Canadian consumers are getting screwed: when I moved here it was cheaper to pay the roaming fees for my US phone in Canada than it was to switch to a Canadian telecom.

FractalParadigm 4y ago

There are quite a few Canadians who live close enough to, or travel across the border often enough that their personal phone/number is from a US carrier, usually the closest town or city to their own. Depending on how often or how you use your phone, it can be half the price of having a plan with a domestic carrier. As far as I'm aware, most of the US carriers only require that the device registers on their home network at least once every six months, and bills to a US address, meaning even just a semi-annual shopping trip to somewhere like Port Huron (where you can also purchase a PO box and therefore have a US billing address) can save you hundreds every year. To add some more context, their excuse for high prices and mediocre service is generally something to do with the size of the country, which granted they aren't exactly wrong, until you realize that roughly 90% of the entire Canadian population lives within 160km (100 miles) of a US border. Canadian telecoms are a legal cartel, for all intents and purposes.

voisin 4y ago
> To add some more context, their excuse for high prices and mediocre service is generally something to do with the size of the country, which granted they aren't exactly wrong,… Not a problem in other sparsely populated, geographically large countries, like Australia.
- dghlsakjg 4y ago
  or say... the US which is an even closer comparison
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    The US is around 10x denser than Canada (slightly smaller, 9x the population).
    - sandworm101 4y ago
      Not really. Candians pack more tightly together. There is far more land per person, but 90% of the canadian population, those in cities, live in a smaller area than the 90% us average. Canada is mostly dense cities separated by empty. By comparison, America is one rolling suburb from coast to coast. Take british columbia, a vastly big place by US standards. Drop one 50-mile circle on vancouver and you have 75% of BC's population covered in one service area. If you draw a line from the ski hills north of vancouver, to alaska, you will cross only two roads. Everything to the north is empty by us standards.
      - aidenn0 4y ago
        My original comment was correct for mean density, but US clumps too. In addition, Cell phone networks need to cover the area people travel, so unless Canadians only travel in an area 11% that of those in the US, the point stands.
        Reason077 4y ago
        > "unless Canadians only travel in an area 11% that of those in the US" Honestly, that's probably not far off. Canada is enormous, but the vast majority of it is completely uninhabited or very, very sparsely populated.
        bawolff 4y ago
        I'd trade not having service in nunavut for a cheaper phone plan.
- kiwijamo 4y ago
  Australia has the worst rural service I've come across in my travels so I wouldn't hold them up as a good example. There are medium sized rural towns with service only from one or maybe two telcos and even then the capacity is often rather limited (one town for instance only had a single 15 MHz LTE channel from an omnidirectional antenna serving the entire town and surrounding region). In New Zealand we pay more than the Australians do but we have service from all carriers to even small towns. In New Zealand towns the same size as the Australian town I mentioned would have a cell site (or even two or three!) from each of our three networks with multiple LTE channels providing LTE carrier aggregation of up up to 50—100 MHz and directional panel antennas. The difference in QOS especially at times of high demand is night and day. In more recent times smaller towns have all three networks cooperating to provide service from the same tower (as part of a joint venture between all three networks called Rural Connectivity Group) making it economical to service small towns with no difference in QOS between networks.I'd rather have the latter than the former IMHO.
  - posguy 4y ago
    Upgrading to just sectors would net them so much more range! Sprint and T-Mobile here in the USA used to do egregious stuff like this, or only put up 1 sector of 3 on a tower just to mostly cover a freeway or highway, ignoring the rural userbase entirely.

SECProto 4y ago

> when I moved here it was cheaper to pay the roaming fees for my US phone in Canada than it was to switch to a Canadian telecom. Was it data quantity that made that feasible? My Canadian plan is $45/month and has unlimited phone time and 6 gigs of data (which is great for my usage) and is on one of the big three carriers so coverage is great. Freedom mobile offers 20gb for $50, but their coverage is weaker (i.e. you're roaming outside of major cities). These convert to $33/$36 in USD. Both of these options look significantly cheaper than any plans I quickly see on the big US carriers, before even accounting for the roaming charges (albeit with more limited data)

lstamour 4y ago
If you go back to when T-mobile was incredibly competitive, plans were often $20-30. If I want a month, I can get a SIM prepaid for $30 or less with all the data in the US, and sometimes as little as $3 in Europe. Plus there was a time, albeit almost a decade ago now when the dollar was on par. Even about a year ago the dollar was still aiming for 0.8 rather than the 0.74 it’s flirting with right now. Lastly, if you want an Apple Watch with cellular, you end up needing a more expensive plan from the big three rather than their sub-brands. And the Canadian government is threatening regulation to encourage carriers to offer more data for less. There was a time within the decade when $60 at Fido would get you 2GB and that was during a “double data” promo. This was 2018. https://forums.redflagdeals.com/fido-60-unlimited-canada-wide-2gb-1405435/ https://forums.redflagdeals.com/fido-60-unlimited-canada-wid...
dghlsakjg 4y ago
The landscape has changed since I came in 2018 (after some parliamentary rumblings, the big telcos rolled out "unlimited plans"), but for context, a 5gb plan was considered a large data plan, and generally was in the $80+ range when I arrived, starter plans were generally 2gb in the $60 region. Extra data wasn't throttled, it was charged for at a high rate. The plan I was referring to is an older tmobile plan with 3 lines on it. They come out to just under $50 cad per line including taxes/fees and that includes 5gb of Canadian/Mexican LTE/5g, unlimited 3g after that, as well as unlimited everything in the US, and no extra charge to call anywhere in NA. I can roam on Bell, Telus or Rogers, so tend to get better coverage than my Canadian friends. I also get unlimited worldwide texting and 2g data when I travel for no additional charge. If I switched to one of the new t-mobile plans, I would be paying $59/line, but that includes a free Netflix subscription, and 10gb of Canadian data. I just priced out a roughly comparable rogers plan for the features I actually use (5gb, unlimited US calls, data in the US) and it comes to $65 CAD + $12 per day I'm in the US, or go for the unlimited US plan which is $105 CAD on a promotional offer right now. Add on another 12% for tax and a bunch of fees I'm sure I'd learn about after the fact, and keeping my US service is very competitive. Rogers new plans, are pretty new (I believe unlimited data only started in 2019 or 2020, and their definition of unlimited is 20gb). The takeaway for me is that if I was just a single line, and I didn't leave Canada much, I would probably pay slightly less. Since I call and text the US daily, and travel there for at least a month a year, I save several hundred dollars a year on tmobile, and don't have to worry about getting billed hundreds or thousands because I forgot to buy a data pass for a trip across the border.

ChumpGPT 4y ago

During the NAFTA 2.0 negotiations, Trudeau allow Rogers and Bell to claim they are Canadian Media companies and not telcos giving them protection against American telcos and made sure that Canadians will never enjoy the same rates US Consumers enjoy by offering this protection. It's the same for many Canadian industries that can operate without any competition from the US. I don't think anyone in the US can even fathom the prices Canadians are charged for the service they get. My $80 Googlefi plan (4 lines) would cost around $500 plus a month in Canada.

gambiting 4y ago

When I travelled to Canada for a week for work, it was cheaper to get a random American roaming card off Amazon with a week worth of roaming data than it was to get any local prepaid SIM. It's crazy.